That's a great point, Sanjay. I'm sure companies in healthcare and education, for example, also have very specific criteria they must use to evaluate any technology platform. And, as LoshBerg said, company size is an important factor, too.

Certain collaboration platforms could be good for financial services industry but not that good for public sector or utilities industry. How successful a particular social platform is for an industry should also be considered; while taking a call on the selection of a platform.

I'd be curious to know what business you're in. I'm working on a Social Collaboration for Dummies book where I need to sort through some of these decision criteria. You can contact me at david.carr@ubm.com

I think another important point is that solution has to fit the size of your business. We tried Yammer, Chatter, Podio - and they totally sucked (for us). We tried Wrike and Bitrix24.com - and loved them both. But that's because we are small. I am sure bigger companies may have tried Bitrix24 first and switched to Yammer, for instance. It's the same with BaseCamp vs Asana. Size does matter.

To be transparent, I am the Community Manager for Jive Software, a vendor in the social business industry.

In my recent past, I spent over 12 years evaluating, learning, implementing, and integrating technology solutions for IT, and I have to agree with Deb on this one, the criteria hasn't changed. What has changed are the methods in which we evaluate each criteria. With the advent of cloud, mobility, and new security standards, technologies are able to push the envelope in terms of what they do and how they deliver it.

One item that I would suggest as an alternative to price, or adding as a new category, would be a measure of business value (or possibly "alignment"). In today's social business market, stories of companies realizing real productivity gains and real top line revenue growth are no longer hard to find, in fact they are quite common place. Using these proven stories and drawing parallels to your goals is a great way to validate that a solution is in alignment with your objectives, while at the same time possibly opening doors to opportunities that you have not already considered. Assessing this additional category will give you a Cost:Value metric that can be more revealing.

On a side note, Jive recently worked with a top three global consulting agency to measure the impact of our social business software on top-line revenue growth. Below are but some of the outstanding results (see image). No doubt, some amazing parallels have already started to form. =)

I'm totally dating myself, but this made me think of the old shoot-outs where we would test Groupware, vs. Exchange, vs. Lotus Notes/Domino. The criteria sound eerily familiar. Is it just the products that have changed?

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